Absence without leave was a guardhouse offense that meant at least three days’ tough confinement, eating stale bread and drinking cold tea, and sleeping on a wooden plank with your shinel, greatcoat, as a blanket. But the tantalizing prospect of sleeping with those willing and experienced nurses overcame our fear. Once we had reconnoitered the town, “the Prince of Georgia,” Sergei Mashenko, and I pooled our money and rented a small furnished apartment nearby from a kindly old babushka whose daughter had married and moved away.
Getting from the campus to that apartment and back was always an adventure. But even with the trees and foliage cut back severely, we found several good routes over the wall.
These routes were also our smugglers’ trail whenever we brought back vodka for a party in the dormitory.
I was on a vodka run just before New Year’s 1981. After making an uneventful sortie into town and returning late at night with my shinel pockets clanking with .75-liter “grenades” of Sibirskaya vodka, I hauled myself back over the wall and dropped down into the shadowy snowdrifts.
“Oh, how nice,” a voice bellowed. “Those are fine trophies you’ve got there, Comrade Kursant.”
It was too dark for us to see each other’s face, but I certainly recognized the voice of Colonel Stonov, one of the battalion commanders. I was looking at a week in the frozen guardhouse.
“Hand it over!” the colonel shouted. “Now!”
I thrust out two squat bottles of vodka. “Comrade Colonel,” I said, disguising my voice with a slur as if I were drunk, “I have more on the other side. Wait one moment, please.”
Before he could answer, I was back over the wall and down on the gritty ice of the pavement on the city side. I dashed all the way around the walled compound and found the hole under the fence near the runway. Once inside the campus, I sprinted back to my dorm. My friends hid the vodka and brushed the snow from my uniform while I crawled into bed. The lights in our bunk room were out when Colonel Stonov came storming up the stairs. Given the time it had taken me to go all the way around the wall, he must have remained standing like a fool where I’d left him for at least five minutes.
He was not amused. But he was never able to prove who had tricked him.
All of us hated the idea of the guardhouse, which was the main deterrent that kept most of the cadets on campus. In the guardhouse the soldiers shaved your head, threw buckets of ice water on your wooden bunk, and generally made your stay there as unpleasant as possible.
Their favorite trick was screaming “Otboy,” “Go to sleep!” while the prisoners were outside in the exercise yard in the evening. At that command they loosed their vicious German shepherds. One cadet grabbed a shovel and clubbed the dogs to death. And the court of inquiry found in his favor and disciplined the sadistic guards.
As the cadet sergeant, I had to escort prisoners in my platoon to the guardhouse. It was a duty I despised. But at least it allowed me and the Prince of Georgia to pull one of the best ruses in the history of Armavir. Gary was caught AWOL in town and given five days guardhouse confinement. I was responsible for both escorting the prisoner and handing over his paperwork. We took a true gamble instead. Gary crawled back over the wall and spent the five days in our apartment. I ripped up his charge sheet.
No one was ever the wiser. But the experience convinced me to relinquish my stripes as a cadet sergeant.
Luckily I was never directly involved in one of the most daring and eventually dangerous cadet escapades. My close friend Sergei Mashenko had shown a real artistic talent since our first days at Armavir. Using tools in the model shop, he made us beautifully crafted switchblade knives that we could use in an emergency to cut parachute shroud lines. And he could sketch freehand detailed engineering drawings that were far superior to anything others could achieve with compass and protractor. Sergei was also an excellent forger. Our military identity papers were a cardboard-faced booklet, with pages listing our particulars, including the all-important entry “Marital Status.”
Using well-sharpened artist’s pencils, Sergei assigned a number of cadets a wife and perhaps a child or two. This deception was invaluable to graduating cadets who had enjoyed the comforts of young ladies from Armavir, but who had no intention of marrying. These were girls who had been urged by their ambitious families to spare no pain in order to snag a new Air Force lieutenant in marriage. Armed with their newly acquired proof of marriage, the cadets would break the sad news to their girlfriends just before graduation. There was not much the girls could do, as bigamy was against the Soviet constitution.
But Sergei was not as lucky as the Prince of Georgia had been. One of his many girlfriends decided to go work as a prostitute in the international hotels on the Black Sea. The managers there let only married girls work as whores because they were supposedly free of disease. Sergei altered her internal passport. But the KGB picked her up and she informed on him. The Osobii Otdel at Armavir launched a full-blown investigation. Sergei was dismissed from the MiG-23 program and almost landed in prison.
During the October leave between my second and third years at Armavir, I was able to visit Leningrad, having saved money by working an unofficial night job in the city. Soviet factory managers were always looking for men eager to perform unpleasant work for high wages. My friends and I contacted the manager of a textile factory near the academy that produced the cotton wadding for quilted winter garments. Our job was to climb inside the huge ventilation conduits and clean the matted lint from the filters. We used our Army gas masks to protect our lungs. It was nasty work, but paid fifteen rubles a night, and the academy never knew about it.
It was common practice for greedy faculty members to barter cadets’ labor for their own gain. Major Zheloudkov, my battalion commander, was one of the worst offenders.
“Well, comrades,” he would say, “we need materials to refurbish our Lenin Rooms.”
There was nothing wrong with the wall paneling or bookcases in the Lenin Rooms, but Zheloudkov had promised a local furniture company to supply cadets for weekend work in exchange for all the material he needed to refurbish his own dacha outside the city. He never roped me into that flunky work because I represented the academy on the Spartak wrestling circuit, and the major was a great sports fan.
In June 1981 we finally completed our formal MiG-23 ground school and sweated through our theoretical exams. My flight instructor was Captain Vladimir Bogorotsky, a typical no-nonsense Air Force instructor, very businesslike and direct. I found him rather humorless, but completely honest and dedicated to his job. It was not surprising that he was the Communist Party secretary of his instructors’ kollectiv.
Bogorotsky’s crew consisted of five cadets. Lapwing Siskin and I were in the first echelon. Deep Freeze had the second echelon to himself. And Misha Soutormin and Anatoli Sarichev formed the third echelon of the crew. With our strong academic background and good record on the L-29, we were probably the best-prepared crew at the academy.
We had worked hard on MiG-23 cockpit simulators, and were completely familiar with the complexities of the afterburning engine, hydraulic wing-sweep control, pulse radar, and infrared search and track system (IRST). But the only way we would truly understand the new aircraft was to fly it.
Our first instruction was in the MiG-23UB, the uchybno boyevoy, a two-seat combat trainer version of the aircraft. As in all Soviet trainers, the instructor sat behind the student, both a reassuring presence and a reminder to the guy in the front seat to pay attention to business.